When we talk about Halloween in NYC, we have to say that the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is so 20th century. A Brooklyn haunted house showcasing professional scarers is what you'll really want to check out this season.

The Gravesend Inn Haunted Hotel is a yearly production by the New York City College of Technology as a departmental project in "entertainment technology"—the kind of training that would prepare you to work on a Cirque de Soleil show in Vegas or be a Disney Imagineer. The hotel is designed to "sense" and respond to visitors; for more on that, check out an engineer's inside take on what makes it run. Last year's production imagined a hotel buried over a sailors' graveyard haunted by vengeful pirate ghosts; will it be zombies (or zombie Michael Jacksons this year?

Certain Brooklynites we know have been rather put out by the filming of "Eat, Pray, Love," the adaptation of author Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling travel memoir starring Julia Roberts as a woman who takes three different trips in a year to get over a destructive divorce.

Well, buckle down everyone as we can expect more movie trailers in, say, 2011: Gilbert's second memoir Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage hits stores in early 2010, and a movie version can't be far behind.

For the four of you who haven't read it yet, Eat, Pray, Love ends with Gilbert finding love in her final destination of Bali, with a Brazilian-born Australian played by Javier Bardem in the movie. Committed sees Gilbert and her lover contemplate getting hitched after he gets detained by the Department of Homeland Security after a trip to France, and then take off across southeast Asia while pondering the question of popping the question. Further spoiler alert: They totally got married at the end.

For the past two weeks, I've sat on a grand jury in Brooklyn Supreme Court, indicting or dismissing charges against defendants accused of some of the most heinous crimes in New York. Unfortunately, it would be illegal for me to divulge the details of the evidence presented to me and my 22 fellow jurors, but what I can do is tell you about some of the restaurants I visited during my one-hour lunch period every day.

For the past ten years or so, the north Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg has been identified primarily with avant-garde art galleries, stylish bars, and of-the-moment restaurants, but every summer, residents are reminded of a much deeper history. Each July, the neighborhood hosts the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a festival that honors a Catholic saint named Saint Paulinus with music, food, parades, and the famous dancing of the giglio. For those who don't know, giglio is the Italian word for lily, and in this case it refers to an 80-foot tall, three-ton statue (pictured) that is carried and "danced" along Havemeyer Street by about 130 thick-necked men known as the Giglio Boys.

You never have to look far for a cup of coffee in NYC, but that doesn’t mean New Yorkers can’t make an obsession out of the search for the perfect cup—and we don’t mean the ubiquitous “best cup of coffee in the world” that Will Ferrell got so excited about in Elf.

Lately, NYC java is more about the super-serious independent coffee shops that have popped up throughout Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, attracting devoted followings by treating a cup of coffee as something akin to an art form. Beans are carefully sourced and locally roasted, baristas are trained on top-notch equipment with all the seriousness of a culinary institute, and customers not only know what country their favorite brew is from, but its town of origin and even the farm.

As the reigning indie music capital of the world, you'd think Brooklyn would have a long-running music festival to rival Austin's SXSW and Manhattan's CMJ, but the ragtag borough has never quite put it together.

But Brooklyn is amping up its game this weekend with the first annual Northside Music and Arts Festival, which will be taking over much of Williamsburg and Greenpoint tonight through Sunday. The blogistas will be out in full force to catch dozens of the borough's up-and-coming bands, along with a couple of A-list indie acts like The Hold Steady, Bishop Allen, and Sunset Rubdown.

The festival has also teamed up with the Williamsburg Gallery Association to offer an evening of music in the galleries tonight, along with a bunch of artsy events throughout the weekend.

All-access badges for the four-day event are a pretty reasonable $45, and shows take place at many of Williamsburg's most popular bars, including Barcade, t.b.d., and the Gutter, with just a few events across the river in—gasp—Manhattan.

Related Stories:
· Northside Festival [Official Site]
· Brooklyn travel coverage [Jaunted]
· Music travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: kenyee]

New York has zoos in each of its five boroughs, and while the Bronx Zoo is the largest metropolitan zoo in the country, the other four are small enough that one can see pretty much every animal there is to see in two or three hours. I actually prefer these bite-sized zoological parks, where you can get in, get your animal fix, and get out with plenty of time left over for a nap before happy hour.

So it looks like this won't be the year I buy a superyacht, but the recession can't keep me off the water entirely. In fact, we took our first boat excursion of the season last weekend - a lovely cruise on Brooklyn's Prospect Park Lake - and it only cost us $16.25, plus two bucks for ice cream. It had been years since I rented a pedal-boat, but the weather was beautiful and we were looking for a cheap way to float, so we took the Q train to the Prospect Park station and made our way to Wollman Rink, where we climbed into a yellow plastic pedal boat and hit the water.

In the not-so-distant future, storefront restaurants in Manhattan will be a thing of the past, and New Yorkers will buy meals exclusively from food trucks. At least that's what it feels like. From crème brulee to waffles, the tastiest restaurants opening up over the last few years haven't really been restaurants at all, but rent-free eateries-on-wheels.

If you're behind on the New York food truck scene, catch up in one afternoon this Saturday, when hip drinking spot BKLYN Yard hosts Parked!, an eating event that brings all the city's best food trucks together in one spot. From pizza to tacos to ice cream, all the foodie faves will be here for one day only.

Coincidentally, this weekend also welcomes the debut of New York's newest food truck. Cupcake Stop will be serving freshly baked frosted treats starting tonight, when it will be parked on 23rd street between 7th and 8th.

So much mobile food, so little time.

Related Stories:
· Parked! [Brooklyn Yard]
· Cupcake Stop [Official Site]
· Food travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: cchen]

It takes coglioni to open a fancy new pizza restaurant in an Italian part of Brooklyn, but Motorino is giving it a go in Williamsburg anyway. Just three blocks from the mostly take-out Sal's Pizza - a longtime favorite of mine - Motorino is looking to attract a more upscale, sit-down clientele, with a handsome wood-accented interior, dim lighting, and downtempo techno tunes piped through the sound system. Motorino's claim to fame is its wood-burning oven, which produces Neapolitan-style pizza with its signature fluffy crust that's ever-so-slightly scorched on the bottom. Since Williamsburg was originally populated by Italians from in and around Naples, particularly the town of Nola, Motorino's version of Neapolitan pizza is sure to receive a curious yet skeptical reception.